


The Distance of Stars

by ProlixInSpace



Series: Viren Week 2020 [4]
Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Almost Kiss, Deleted Scenes, M/M, Magic, Stars, Viren Week (The Dragon Prince), Viren Week 2020, spoilers for another fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23587612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixInSpace/pseuds/ProlixInSpace
Summary: Viren and Aaravos have an unusual moment in an unusual place.
Relationships: Aaravos/Ziard (Mentioned/Discussed), Almost Aaravos/Viren But Not Quite
Series: Viren Week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693006
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40





	The Distance of Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is my last Viren Week 2020 piece before I get back to work on The Time That Is Given Us. As such, please consider this a "deleted scene" -- it is freshly written, but it's been coalescing in my head almost since I started the overall story itself, and I have constantly debated myself about whether to actually write it. Ultimately I decided that while it didn't quite have a home in the main story, my Viren Week fun was a great excuse to exorcise it from my brain meats. It also serves as a bit of a teaser for what is to come in Book 5. 
> 
> Naturally, that means there's spoilers for The Time That Is Given Us, as this takes place after Chapter 7 and before Chapter 9, so if you are the sort of person who might be bothered by that, go read that first.

**(Day 7)**

**The Distance of Stars**

There’s no shortage of surprises in the twists and turns of the Kannati palace complex. This time, Viren has found for himself nothing less than a full-scale _theater,_ buried in the lower levels all the way to one side. 

The network of lightballs (still a marvel to him) is like a lure to a deep-sea fish, leading him here. The place is easily three-stories high in all, and slanted forward, so that patrons would not have to peer over one another to enjoy whatever took place on the raised stage at the front. Given that they would have horns, this is an especially clever design.

In its heyday, it must have been beautiful. He can imagine the chatter of a crowd five hundred strong, waiting with anticipation for a show to begin. Now, the side-walls are crumbling inward between the struts that hold up the ceiling, and dust and debris cover the burned-out, threadbare fabric of the seats -- that is, where the stuffing hasn’t already been chewed away by pests. Chunks of plaster and stone form the audience of a lightless, noiseless, motionless play. 

The silence is unlike any other in Viren’s memory. Even the most deeply buried and concealed passages in an ordinary castle transmit the sounds of water flowing through the cistern, footsteps on the stones above, even voices, at times. 

Here, the phrase _as silent as the grave_ comes unerringly to mind. If he sits very still (to avoid squeaking the springs in the more-or-less-intact seat he has chosen, one space away from the center aisle) and he closes his eyes, he would swear he can hear the beat of his own heart. 

When a different muffled rhythm interrupts it, he knows that Aaravos has found him. Under normal circumstances, he is soft-footed enough to sneak up on him, and frequently does. Here, though, even the smallest sound might as well be an explosion placed up against the oppressive quiet.

“I imagine you came here, when it was… active,” Viren says to acknowledge his presence.

“Once or twice, perhaps” Aaravos admits. He rests a finger on one of the dim, amber lightballs on posts that line the walkway, pulling it away quickly when the heat becomes too much. He squints past it and, apparently deciding that the aisleside seat next to Viren has an acceptable level of structural integrity, elects to sit down. “The music was excellent. The dramas, though…” He chuckles. “Terrible. Broadly speaking, humans are almost always the superior storytellers.”

“Must be the lifespan,” Viren asserts, just the kind of leaden, veiled insult he was raised to dispense.

Aaravos places a hand to his chest in mock indignation. “I’ll have you know _I_ am an exception. I’m _excellent_ with a story.”

“Perhaps I would _know_ that if you were a bit more forthcoming with them.”

After a pause long enough to become awkward, Aaravos nudges: “You’re going to make me ask.”

He’d like to, but he hates when people do the same to him, so he says, “No, I won’t.”

Aaravos angles his body toward Viren and offers both dusk-painted hands, expectation kicking up like a dust storm. Viren extends his right hand and allows it to be captured. 

The arcanum that Viren selects hardly matters, or so he thinks. He’s tried a few, only ever using whatever was nearest to hand, and Aaravos has been equally satisfied with each, never once making a request. In his current state, he is isolated from all of them, and even using dark magic to make contact is -- in a fact frustratingly contrary to Viren’s fundamental understanding of the nature of things -- seemingly out of Aaravos’ reach. 

There is only one remedy, and that is for magic to be first extruded, and then passed to him, with a few discrete effects. Firstly, it alleviates what is apparently quite significant discomfort. Beyond that, it fuels the maintenance and development of the odd flesh-puppet he’s walking around in, helping him cement his link to it just a little more. Alternatively, if he doesn’t use it for that, it provides him with a little short-lived ammunition with which he can cast small spells.

At the moment, what Viren happens to have in his pocket is a broken fragment of a stellalope’s glittering hoof, too small to be useful for much other than this. It’s the first time he’s had something Star-linked at hand in one of these moments, but he thinks little of this. He closes his fist around it. 

There is no incantation to this bizarre procedure, only absorption and redirection. Inside his curled fingers, the hoof-shard turns to dust and gray-pink light threads about like smoke. It seeps into him, slipping fishlike up his left arm and through the center of his chest (which grows cold at the touch of the energy) and down his right arm.

If hair-thin vines made of ice itself could sprout from beneath the top layer of his skin, he imagines it would feel very much like this. The power escapes his right palm, tendrils winding briefly around the clasp of their hands, and then it is drawn into Aaravos as air is drawn into a lung.

 _“Ah,”_ sighs Aaravos, eyes closed, mouth hardly moving. “I wish I could tell you--”

Here it comes. Every time, he’s got some poesy to try and explain it.

“Setting down a heavy weight,” Aaravos composes his latest imagery. “Fresh air after being buried in a fetid cell.”

It’s not exactly unpleasant for Viren either, come to it. The sensation that lingers afterward is not unlike the displaced satisfaction he might experience on finishing a book in which he was deeply involved. If he were particularly candid, he might describe it as being pleasantly _stirred,_ in the way of a pond after heavy rainfall. Something about it heightens his senses in a way he enjoys.

Focusing on that is much nicer than focusing on the way the whole thing reminds him of a mother bird regurgitating slurry for a chick.

Viren goes to pull his hand back into his lap, but Aaravos doesn’t quite release him -- either his hand, or his eye contact. 

“Like touch,” Aaravos continues, “After three _centuries_ of isolation.”

Is he--

“Don’t you think it’s time to let _go?_ ” Aaravos poses, which is funny, since _letting go_ is exactly what he _isn’t_ doing. He leans forward, using Viren’s hand as leverage to pull him close, inches away, the kind of nearness he often struck as a phantom but _different_ now that there’s warmth, now that they’re sharing air. Even if his spirit remains locked away, he does an awfully convincing impression of true life.

“Aaravos--”

He places his other hand on Viren’s upper arm, fingers pressing into a hold there. “Don’t you get _tired?”_

He does. _Exhausted,_ really. No one would accuse him of being _loosely wound_. His eyes betray him, darting down from Aaravos’ dark-and-gold stare to his mouth and back again, and at this distance, there’s no hiding the moment. The quiet is strangling, no sound but the movement of fabric and a half-held stutter of breath. They are a pinprick, a spark of life in the abyssal expanse of the theater.

It would be _so easy_ to give in to this gravity, this orbital decay and its inevitable collision, to accept that outside his limited perception of the dimension of time, what he is thinking of has already _happened,_ and--

And then he is stricken with understanding.

There’s no way to know what _exactly_ tips him off. Perhaps he had to identify it in himself first, in order to see it on Aaravos. 

Viren rolls his shoulder out of the grasp and pulls back his hand abruptly enough to free it. The armrest of the seat on the other side of him digs into his back as he leans away.

At the risk of alienating a _second_ traveling companion in the same week, he asks in an almost-whisper, “You’re miles away. Who is it you’re seeing?”

Aaravos freezes. Several things happen for him at once. The tips of his ears fall back and his eyes go wide, blinking like a startled deer as he draws a quick inhale and holds it. When he recoils back into the boundaries of the theater chair, he becomes _smaller,_ somehow.

He looks down at the frame of the seat in front of him, and then up again to Viren. As near as Viren can tell, there is none of the embarrassed anger he might have expected, which is a relief.

“You’re right,” Aaravos says, and Viren is mildly insulted by the disbelief in his tone. “Tell me they didn’t erase him, too? To scrub _my_ name from history is one thing, but--”

“Who?”

_“Ziard.”_

“No, there are... tales.” Viren struggles to re-calibrate, to adjust to the hard turn of the conversation. Despite being the author of the shift, he demonstrates less flexibility than Aaravos does. “But I imagine they’re largely apocryphal, being a thousand years old--”

“What are they? What remains of him?”

“A martyred folk hero. A powerful mage who struck a blow to the archdragon that would see humanity wither.”

Aaravos tips his head back, resting his horns against the edge of the chair. _“‘When I’m gone, don’t let them forget,’_ he said to me. He was afraid of the way the story would be told by the victors, if the fight was lost. It’s… ironic, that _he_ died so long ago and _I_ was the one forgotten.”

Viren has to admit it sounds utterly exasperating. 

“Do you know,” Aaravos inquires, pivoting his head to face Viren again. “Stars above are so distant, that even the light itself takes time to reach this world. To look at the stars is...”

“Looking into the past,” Viren completes. They teach that in school, these days. Aaravos must remember when humanity first uncovered knowledge like that.

“Did you perhaps also, for a moment, view the past? Recall some--”

“Yes.” So it was that, after all. 

A malfunction in time, acting on the ribbon that ties them -- or perhaps a rope would be a more accurate analogy, braided as it is from not only the blood that began it but the less easily explicable tether that has formed since then.

“Look at us,” Aaravos laughs: not mocking, but companionably resigned, laughing _with_ Viren, not at him. On the distant ceiling, he traces ornate patterns with his eyes. Under his breath, he says, “Lonely old fools.”

“For… rather disparate values of old,” Viren finds it in himself to joke prosaically. More earnestly, he says, “I would hear the entire story, if you would tell it.”

“Soon,” Aaravos says. “I think that time has almost come.”


End file.
